Thoughts on older movies, especially those from the 1930s to 1950s.

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Beggars of Life (1928)

After being overwhelmed by William Wellman’s Wings (1927), I wanted to see another of his few surviving silent films. This is a haunting tale of tramps wandering through a shadowy underworld, starring Louise Brooks, Richard Arlen and Wallace Beery.

Louise Brooks and Richard Arlen

Although this film was made before the Great Depression, it looks forward to later Wellman movies like Wild Boys of the Road (1933) in focusing on the outcasts of society and showing poor people’s desperate struggle to survive. I’m not going to go into as much detail about this movie as I did about Wings, but I definitely think it’s another masterpiece – and I’m saddened that it is so little known.

The film is a powerful melodrama loosely based on Jim Tully’s tramp autobiography Beggars of Life, which had already been successfully adapted as a Broadway play Outside Looking In, by Maxwell Anderson, starring Charles Bickford and James Cagney. I’m not sure how close the film is to the play – Anderson isn’t mentioned as a source at the imdb – but one review of the play I found does mention the mock trial scene, which is also a key section of the film, and I have the impression Bickford and Cagney’s characters on stage must have been very close to those played by Beery and Arlen in the film.

There have been showings at cinemas in recent years, so there must be a good print in existence, but the DVD I got hold of is a dark and grainy video transfer, where whole scenes are almost impossible to see . Yet, even watching the film under these conditions, the moody cinematography by Henry W Gerrard is striking, with the characters glimpsed in a space of light in the middle of the screen surrounded by shadows. The night scenes are tinted blue and the day scenes red (this seems to have been done in a lot of silent films), adding to the atmosphere.

Louise Brooks, Richard Arlen and Wallace Beery

The most striking part of the film is the first few minutes. Arlen’s character, the tramp Jim, is indeed seen “on the outside looking in”, hungrily peering through a window at a man slumped over a table set with a lavish breakfast. He walks in and asks for something to eat, but is ignored – and eventually realises that the man has been shot dead. A moment later a young girl (Louise Brooks) walks down the stairs and sees him. He is about to explain that he isn’t the killer, when she tells him that the dead man is her adoptive father and she killed him after he tried to rape her – as she speaks, the events she is recounting are seen happening in a shadowy form behind her, a brilliant experimental sequence which I would love to have seen more clearly.

Jim and the girl, Nancy (she is never named in the film, but her name is given as Nancy in the cast list) decide to flee before she is arrested for murder. She disguises herself as a boy and they try to jump on to a freight train, but she falls off, and, when they do get on board, they are thrown off . There are then scenes of them walking, hitching lifts on passing vehicles and going back to the trains again – some shots just show their legs trudging, or their arms and hands as they cook makeshift meals over campfires. There is one dreamlike scene where they turn a haystack into a temporary shelter, or nest, sleeping inside it. Their relationship is all very tentative and gentle, with no kisses, but just expressions on their faces showing how they are coming to love one another. The film does give a feeling of the hard work of walking such long distances, and of their poverty and isolation as outsiders in society.

Louise Brooks is luminous as Nancy, while I think Richard Arlen is also great as the quiet, noble tramp Jim, doing a great deal with his eyes. Both of them give poignantly understated performances despite this being a melodrama. Wallace Beery hams it up more as an older tramp they run into on their travels, Oklahoma Red – when the film was originally shown, it had some sound sequences, including a title song performed by Beery, but this has been lost, though I did find a version on the web performed by another singer, Scrappy Lambert.

Nancy and Jim meet Red at a sort of shanty town for tramps, which has its own laws and system of government. When police come looking for Nancy, Red helps them to escape, but then insists that she should be handed over to him as his reward – “If I’m in a gang, it’s my gang, and if there’s a girl in the gang, she’s my girl.” He organises a mock trial which seems to be a savage parody of the criminal justice system, with Jim being assumed guilty and sentenced before his “defence counsel”, another tramp, has even been allowed to say a word. The intertitles bring home the parallels with real courts, with sardonic changes to the official words – for instance, the prosecuting attorney is the “persecutin’ attorney”.

This is one of the earliest films I’ve seen with a major role for an African-American actor, Blue Washington, who plays another tramp, Mose, looking after and struggling to save a sick friend. There’s nothing particularly comic about his performance, but some scenes are all too stereotyped and the inter-titles keep pointing him out as comic relief by heavily mocking his accent.

After the high point of the trial scene, there are then a number of increasingly unlikely and sentimental plot twists which see Beery’s character having a change of heart and changing from bullying predator into the real hero of the film. It’s all compelling enough to watch, but I think the film’s real greatness lies in its earlier scenes.

All in all, though, this is a film I’m glad to have seen – and the quality of both this and Wings makes me so sad that some of Wellman’s other silent films have been lost forever.

10 thoughts on “Beggars of Life (1928)”

A Wonderful review Judy, and the film sounds like a work that falls right with Wellman’s depression era films, which you mention. Brooks is suppose to be amazing in this film. I never cared for Wallace Beery but it sounds like he fits the part. It really is a shame this film is so hard to find. looking forward to the next Wellman.

In any case, that’s quite the opening scene there, especially ho wit segues into that experimental sequence. I am not at all surprised that Louise Brooks is “luminous” and that Richard Arlen uses his eyes to great effect. I understand you felt some the later scenes veered down that sentimental path, but that the film prior to that was masterful. I am frankly every excited about this news, as the silents/1920’s film poll is upon us, and this will be an essential film to take a look at.

Many thanks for the kind comments and for finding this link, Sam – I must admit that the DVD I got via the UK ebay site was a copy someone had made from an old video by the look of it, so I’m interested to hear there is an official DVD in existence, though from a small company! I wonder if it is remastered – doesn’t seem to say in the comments, but if so I could be tempted. I’m only just really starting to get into silents, and looking forward to picking up recommendations and learning more during the silent/1920s season at Wonders. Again, many thanks.

Hi
We will be screening Beggars of Life as part of the British Silent Film Festival in Leicester on Thursday 15 April, 2010 at 8.30pm. Live musical accompaniment will be provided by the Dodge Brothers (Mark Kermode/Michael Hamond/Aly Hirji/Alex Hammond) and Neil Brand. It should be a wonderful event.
Website and brochure are currently being constructed. For more information you can contactdirector@britishsilents.co.uk
Laraine Porter

Thank you so much for posting about this, Laraine – it sounds wonderful. I’d love to see it though I’m not sure what the chances are of me being able to get there. The whole festival sounds like a great event and I will definitely put up a link to the website when it is up. Thanks again!

Critics and media consider Wallace Beery to be practically abhorrent in today’s restrictive politically correct atmosphere, he runs such roughshod over the dreary homogeneity we’re stuck with now in acting and behavior itself (and I gathered you’re not a Beery admirer when you invoked the “hams it up” phrase) but I think he’s one of the most skilled and powerful actors ever recorded on film. The only performer I’ve seen with quite that level of sheer forceful power would be Lon Chaney, Sr., particularly in “The Unknown” with Joan Crawford, and Beery ironically more of less inherited Chaney’s career at MGM after Chaney’s death. Clark Gable could almost match him in “Hell Divers” (1931), Gable’s first leading role, but not quite. As I believe Cukor said, if memory serves, Beery always brings a lot to the table, you know you’re working with something. His early sound era MGM contract called for him to be paid $1 more than the next highest paid actor on the lot, a clause that came back to haunt them when they hired Garbo, and effectively made him the highest paid actor in the world. After he, young Cubby Brocolli, and gangster Pat DiCicco allegedly beat Ted Healy to death in the parking lot of the Trocadero in 1937 and Beery was shipped by the studio to Europe for a few months until the heat was off, the pictures he was offered didn’t have quite the status or budget that he’d enjoyed before but no Beery picture lost money in the sound era and he only relinquished top billing on four films during that entire period.

Anyway, I’ve been a Beery admirer (of his work, not his murdering a colleague in a parking lot or savagely pinching Margaret O’Brien and pulling out the stops to make 9-year-old Jackie Cooper as miserable as humanly possible) since childhood and I’m gratified to find him as endlessly entertaining as ever in my current capacity as an adult, before eventually probably abruptly lapsing into some dreadful dementia.